Reliability analysis of contingent valuation surveys for measuring the benefit of environmental quality improvement-an empirical study on Lake Biwa area in Japan

Introduces methods to estimate confidence intervals of the mean willingness to pay (WTP) measured by the closed-ended contingent valuation method (CECVM) surveys, focusing on a discrete choice probit model. Two types of confidence intervals of the mean WTP are proposed. One is for the mean WTP of each individual and the other is for the population mean WTP. These two confidence intervals are formulated in firms analytically tractable. An empirical study is executed to illustrate performances of the proposed confidence intervals of mean WTP with heterogeneous variances by CECVM survey data which involves water quality improvement